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Chasing China's wind power, with pure heart

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2009-10-06 18:11

BEIJING: To most people interested in the wind game in China, he bore a familiar face. He was a pioneer in the country's grid connected wind power development, a key inspirator of China's first Renewable Energy Law, and was widely recognized as the wind power person in China with frankness that earned him great respect industry wide.

He is Shi Pengfei, vice president of Chinese Wind Energy Association (CWEA), who was able to answer almost all questions about wind power market and policies in China, despite being retired for nearly a decade.

Born in 1940 in Kunming, southwest China's Yunnan Province, Shi's association with wind power was quite accidental. With physics being one of his favorite subjects, he was recruited to a training team for gliders at a senior high school. But he missed only by a hair to qualify for the First National Student's Sports Meeting in 1959 and brought home a second-grade sportsman certificate.

Although he applied for an aviation-related college major, a discipline widely associated with national defense, it was turned down as his family was found to have relatives in Taiwan, a "renegade rival" according to the mentality then.

As luck had it, Shi was admitted as a machine designing major and was assigned to work in the remote western province of Qinghai after graduation.

In 1980, when Shi was director of technology and intelligence section at Xining Research Institute of Mechanical & Electrical Engineering for High Altitude, he joined a two-year overseas training program sponsored by the Ministry of Education to study wind energy application in the Netherlands.

It was at Delft University of Technology and the Energy Research Center of the Netherlands that Shi Pengfei got acquainted with the early leading technology of wind power and involved in the testing of a 300 KW experimental wind turbine generator as well as wind-farm construction.

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He spent the last half-year in Reading University, the United Kingdom, thanks to his command of English, studying a wind-diesel hybrid power system computer modelling.

Returned to Qinghai in 1984, Shi started working for the newly established Chinese Wind Energy Development Center under the State Commission of Science and Technology. In 1986 he first saw to a Sino-Belgian governmental project for building one of the country's earliest wind farms in Pingtan, Fujian. Later he participated in a Sino-UK governmental project building a wind/diesel hybrid power system on an island near Yantai, Shandong

In 1996, Shi, 55, was put in charge of the New Energy Division of China Hydropower Engineering Consulting Group, which was entrusted to handle the preliminary work such as planning and feasibility studies of the country's wind power development.

China's development of grid connected wind power debuted in the mid of the 1980s. Shi Pengfei was one of the pioneers who followed closely the course of every progress. Upheld as trusted authority in the field, his advice on wind power policies and technologies was taken seriously by both decision-makers and company managers.

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